The Christmas episode. Everything is festive and seasonal. James goes on the run in death valley, and Kaleb talks about building a gingerbread boxcar and Hobo Santa. There's even some good time snark, lots of SEO-friendly snark, about Jingle All The Way. And if that's somehow not good enough, get this:

Kaleb has an Oscar screener of The Interview. The entire episode is about the fallout of the Sony hack, and the loss of this wonderful, biting satire which may now be a victim of the times, against the wishes of the American people. We run down the entire thing, scene by scene, line by line, note by note. This is where you should go if you want to know about that movie.

P.S. Are you drunk right now? Feeling sentimental? Got a nice Christmas bonus like they talk about in old-timey movies? Donate to the show. We have $30 toward our 2015 hosting goal of $180, and it'd be great if anybody could help us kill that off so we can never mention donations.

James goes to the doctor. Kaleb talks about the holidays and Merle Haggard and whatever the hell else it was. Also, The Last Exit Show would like to formally acknowledge a great, ghostly 45 from private press purgatory so that we might eventually shed light on it: Frank Thomas - Love You Deep Or Not At All.

To compete with that NPR show Serial, Kaleb and James have turned the podcast into a serialized science-fiction murder mystery where they investigate a cold case on Mars. Even their unscripted segments now include obtuse hints about the crime, and provide background for the very intricate plot, which spans generations. History, blood, the sins of the father, the conflict between believers and non-believers, the wounded heart of the old weird America, all of it in space.

Also, since we're doing all this work with prestige fiction, maybe toss us a few bucks on paypal at thelastexitshow@gmail.com. We're out of hosting money. Kaleb has to pay for it at the end of the month and he doesn't really have the bread to do it without pain.

Just a quick marginally spooky test run of a new microphone. Plus, new content to satisfy the content beast. It'll kill you. It wants you dead, this content beast. It's eating New Yorkers. I swear it's true. I've seen it.

This is a one-off, boys and girls. A sad, meandering, unprofessional one-off. Kaleb talks into a microphone at 2 a.m. without his co-host Big Jim Murphy. It goes in a lot of new directions, all of them bad.

Normally we wouldn't allow something like this to happen, but we're taking too much time off between episodes and the content beast must be satisfied. We're struggle podcasters, not Johnny Carson.

If y'all like this, let us know and we'll consider doing hand-offs like this once a month or something. Because it's a struggle getting us both into a room at the same time, what with the ol' time delay.

P.S. Not that it matters, but at some point a Hank Williams song is mentioned but misidentified. The song was "Hey Good Lookin'".

Editor's Note: we're ditching the PayPal donate button. We didn't get less desperate - it just made this page look like too much of a damn racket. Hosting the show is $15 a month and if you ever feel like tossing a few bucks our way, you know where we're at.

This episode was recorded on Labor Day, so we allowed a guest, Nathan Roberson, to write our opening sketch. In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that he was paid The Last Exit Show's usual rate of no money at all. In New York City, this is sometimes called "writing for exposure." He had a line in there that was rewritten at the last minute for being Problematic. Watch as we fumble awkwardly because we forgot to rewrite it in any serious way. We'll be back to the usual routine of me writing sketches the hour before the show tapes starting next week.

We also talk, in scattershot ways, about Bettie Page, 90-year-old drug mules, and video games of all damn things.

If you want to give us money, none of which will be used to pay Nathan Roberson unless that affects your interest in also giving us money, you can do that over here at PayPal. I should probably not include the button every damn week. It comes off as desperate. But I am desperate, so hey.

The correct version of that got lost in the shuffle when we migrated from Podomatic to Libsyn, and the one on here now is broken, inexplicably short by 8 minutes or some such thing. I'm going to fix it and reupload it. Delete your original version if you care about such things.

Sketch: The Hugely Inappropriate Last Role of a Legendary Actor. (Inspired by the death of Lauren Bacall, who was in an episode of Family Guy, but also inspired by every other actor who has ever lived.)

James goes to a sex store, because I guess he's gunning for a gig at Vice. Kaleb drives to the middle of nowhere.

Movie Recommendations for Miserable People: The Vanishing, Pay Day.

Give us some money if you're a wayfaring rich guy. Libsyn is expensive.

We're now on Libsyn in earnest. So I gotta do these descriptions right.

There's an opening sketch. We're trying to do a sketch every week to keep the writing muscles limber. We're also doing this as a sort of anti-improv mission statement.

We talk about the passing of Kaleb's hero, Jim Rockford. We also talk about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and outsider art phenomenon LEWIS. This was recorded prior to his discovery, unfortunately, but hey, that's just this business.

Alright. We're caught up. This is the first Libsyn-exclusive episode. No more Podomatic for us. Not ever. Unless people don't donate when our money runs out. Then we'll probably wind up there again. But hey, right now it's time for big, shimmering statements of optimism.

I remember nothing about this episode because Podomatic ran out of bandwidth and I got distracted. We did a sketch. Thanks to everybody who helped us get here. Another new episode next Saturday.

Again I failed on this episode's original publication. No idea what was in this one. Good title though. Swear I'll come back to it, teacher. I'll take the C+ and it'll be fine. I've been having trouble at home, teacher. I got a hard life, see.

Damn. Another episode where I didn't listen to playback and tried to "clever" my way out of it, like a kid who blew a homework assignment and wrote "grading is actually bad for a child's development." I'll come back to this. Maybe. Look, it's another hour of show from us. I don't really think it matters. It can't matter.

The Last Exit goes for a drive to the wrong side of town. Also, Kaleb steals from a preacher's boy.

Note: I mentioned that I took all these pictures I've been using, right? Isn't that cool? Very creative. Good job, Kaleb. You're really talented. You're "I want to buy a print from you for $100 immediately" talented.

Kaleb and James dedicate an entire episode to their appreciation of Bob Dylan*. Features our top 50 BOB DYLAN songs, our top 50 BOB DYLAN interviews, and our countdown of the best BOB DYLAN influenced moments in pop culture.

The original episode description for this was too embarrassing to repurpose. We talked about Pete Seeger, who had recently died and Kaleb thought sounded too educated. We also talked about famous people who have killed people with helicopters. But in a funny way, not a libelous way.

As a treat to themselves for the milestone fiftieth episode, your hosts drop the self-placed embargo on chatting about Johnny Cash and spend about fifty minutes on the Man In Black. Hopefully it will never happen again.

P.S. That picture up there is the first picture I ever took. It's in Tehachapi. Same place where our first 39 episodes are buried. You won't find them. They're too well hidden. There are no markers. There's no trail. Don't try.

A new year*. A new season. Discussion about the holiday season and those post-apocalypse southern gothic D*****t cartoons S***t A***s has been doing. Not Kaleb. S***t A***s.**

*Here, we meant 2014. This year. Not a new year anymore. It's over halfway over, actually. We weren't expecting this show to ever be reposted in August.

**All references to the content in question have been censored, because none of this ever happened, to the best of our knowledge. You'd be wise to turn around and just go on back to your house and forget you ever heard any of this stuff, alright? Go home.

I think this is the episode where Kaleb read Nick Tosches' Hellfire and couldn't shut up about it for so much as one second. The Last Exit Show hates real killers and we would certainly never tell a story about one. Nobody likes that kind of thing.

Damn it, the episode description to this one was just me asking people to pay for an eventual Libsyn subscription. I'll come back to it later this week. I swear I'll come back to it and fix this. (I probably won't.)

We're a comedy podcast. The comedy podcast for you to stagger into after all the reputable comedy podcasts have closed, where improv kids are regarded with deep skepticism and happy people are banned outright.

We talk, we do sketches, we try to be funny sometimes but we don't force it when we have something interesting to say, and we've been doing it awhile. This episode is for people just discovering the show on Libsyn. It's also a way to hunker down and get nostalgic if you've been listening for a long time. There are a few of you, and I can prove it.

It's not our first episode, of course. How insane would that be, to preserve our first episode for the whole world to see? It was probably just a collection of "umms" and ironic belligerence. Besides, it's gone. I threw it away. It's buried six feet underground in a train yard in Tehachapi.

Our archive, such as it is, starts at episode 40. Episode 40 is when we found an EQ method we were content with, had pop screens, real mics, and consistent volume leveling. Before that, there were usually audio problems that we blindly tolerated because we had no idea the show would survive this long. Maybe someday we'll do a "best of the first 40," but you don't need to hear the whole thing, unedited.

Episode 40 is the first episode we don't have to apologize for. Much. So it's the first episode you'll be hearing after this. I hope you enjoy. We put a lot of work into it. Tell your friends. Subscribe on iTunes when that feature becomes available.